The marketing department is often tasked with more than just maintaining a quality brand reputation. For many organizations, the B2B marketing team is responsible for providing quality inbound leads to the sales team. The key term here is quality. Provide quality leads and the sales team is quiet, provide low-quality leads and the sales team becomes vocal.
In this blog post, we explore 4 strategies to improve the quality of your B2B marketing leads (and win the favor of the sales team!).
What Is a Quality Lead?
First, let’s address what a quality lead is. A quality lead is not a whale of a deal that will cover your sales quota for the month.
For many B2B organizations, a quality lead can include various types of leads. In general terms, a quality lead is a prospect who is in your target market and wants to buy your products or services. It might not be a huge sale to start with, but a quality lead often has the potential for a larger lifetime value for sales.
Alright, now that we have a good idea of what a quality lead is, let’s look at how to improve the quality of leads you are getting.
Learn how to make your B2B website lead-centric.
Refine Your Message
So much time and effort are spent on building out CTAs, crafting killer blog copy, and drafting the perfect opening email that the overall messaging is diluted or overlooked. Take a serious look at the main message on your B2B website and marketing materials and answer a few questions:
- Is it clear what products/services you offer?
- Do you discuss the value/benefits of your services/products?
- Do people outside of your organization understand your business from your website’s homepage?
- Is your message clear and concise? (It should be 5 – 6 words tops!)
If you answered no to any of these, take another pass at refining and clarifying your message. You may need to look outside your organization for help on simplifying your message.
Don’t Be Afraid to Say No
A smart business model, particularly in B2B, is specific and clear. Your B2B marketing and sales team should know what you sell and what you do not sell. Don’t be afraid to tell website visitors what your company does not offer (and why, if necessary). This will help the prospect to qualify themselves.
Don’t work with companies that have revenue under $500,000 because your services have a higher price tag? State that you only work with companies with over $500K in revenue because they get the most value from your services. Saying no is the best way to be considerate of a potential leads’ time.
Forget Visit Quantity and Focus on Quality
Driving website traffic for the sake of traffic is an ineffective technique for improving leads and will never improve the quality of your leads. Instead of focusing on driving more traffic to your B2B website, focus on driving quality traffic.
A strong B2B marketing strategy is continually being refined and looks to exclude non-viable prospects. For example, a company that works exclusively with non-profits will not benefit from driving traffic from companies in the for-profit sector.
Our best advice here is to get specific – in your website copy, in your ad copy, in your search ad targeting, in your email campaigns, etc. Being specific ensures that you miss out on certain types of website visitors – but those folks aren’t in your target market.
Speak Your Prospects’ Language
Don’t talk about what matters to you, talk about what matters to your target market. This includes creating B2B marketing copy that addresses your prospects’ needs and pain points. Don’t talk about features – talk about the end results.
Another big mistake we see B2B companies make is to create their own terminology. Unless you are Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, or Samsung – no one is going to adapt to your terminology. It’s OK to use abbreviations that are common in the industry, like SaaS or ROI, but if your team creates an acronym to use internally – do not use it on any marketing materials. If your prospect can’t understand what you are saying, they will assume you don’t understand them and won’t be the right partner for them.
Don’t Just Drive Leads, Drive the Right Leads
At Bop Design, our mantra is to help B2B marketing teams garner quality leads. We never promise to drive X amount of leads because that doesn’t speak to the quality of the leads. By following the strategies here, you can start improving the quality of your B2B marketing leads and build a successful brand.
